Prisma The Best App to Convert Photos into Art

If you haven’t heard of Prisma yet, you will soon. On the face of it, it’s just an ordinary photo manipulation app. It was uploaded on 11th June without much ceremony. It had taken one and a half months to develop. It had a marketing budget of zero. Less than 2 weeks after its launch, despite being only available on Apple iOS so far, it had been downloaded a staggering 1.6 million times.

An impressive image editing app has hit the Apple App Store, but will be coming to the Google Play Store “later this month”. It is named ‘Prisma’ and can make your images look like paintings from some of the most renown artists of all time, including Picasso, Van Gogh, Levitan and more.

The concept is pretty simple. It allows users to modify their photos, much like Instagram filters. The options, though, are slightly more highbrow than your average Instagram filter – the app lets you pick your picture to be transformed into the style of a famous painter, say a Van Gogh or a Picasso. And the results are quite stunning.

Prisma app has some of the most impressive filters we have seen

Prisma, now, is a very different kettle of fish. It not only allows you to convert your photographs into art work, but actually lets you pick the styles that you want. There are a total of thirty four different effects and filters to choose from right now, and these are based on the works of the likes of Van Gogh, Munch and Picasso. Mind you, these are not named by artist so you actually have to work out what you want though a bit of trial and error. And before you ask, there is no way to blend the styles of two different artists or works of art or change colour levels of specific parts of a picture.

10 amazing Prisma app images that started as simple selfies

And Prisma has cleverly made sure that it helps with this virality. The app has emphasized on user friendliness and speed. While the concept of repainting images isn’t new, Prisma does it faster and more elegantly than its competitors. It takes the processing to the cloud, and does a nifty job with the marketing too. The #prisma while sharing on Instagram is optional, but it already has over 500,000 shares.

It remains to be seen though if Prisma can sustain its momentum. While the product has undeniable appeal, it’s possible that it could be short lived. The internet’s memory is notoriously fickle, and fads can be replaced in weeks. Not so long ago, Flappy Bird had gotten off to a similar start, but its appeal had fizzled out quickly. But then some fads sustain. Who’d have thought that a company whose USP was deleting your images after 10 seconds would end up being worth $20 billion? Long term success or not, one thing’s for certain – be prepared to see a lot more of Prisma images over the coming weeks.